https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaProfile?id=a0Jt000001J4tYDEAZ

305326

On October 23, 2000, the Central Identification Lab-Hawaii (CILHI, now DPAA) accounted for Private First Class Kenneth M. Montgomery, missing from World War II.

Private First Class Montgomery, who entered the U.S. Marine Corps from Illinois, was a member of Company B, 2nd Marine Raider Battalion. On August 17, 1942, members of the 2nd Raider Battalion participated in an attack on a Japanese seaplane base on the small island of Butaritari, Makin Atoll, in the Gilbert Islands. PFC Montgomery was killed during the ensuing battle. He was buried on Butaritari by local villagers in a mass grave with other Marines who had died during the assault. His remains were not recovered after the war. In 1999, a CILHI investigative team traveled to Butaritari and interviewed a villager who participated in the burial, which led the team to a communal gravesite located under an abandoned coral road. The team recovered a set of commingled remains, which were brought to the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii in late 1999. Analysts eventually identified PFC Montgomery from among these remains.

Private First Class Montgomery is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Kenneth M Montgomery